


Cause if we’re all gonna die (Now’s the time to be alive)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Banter, Crushes, Drinking & Talking, First Kiss, Gen, M/M, Pining, Team Bonding, and of course my favorite tag, everyone in the core four (except chin) had a crush on everyone else at some point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-16 22:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20610329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “I happen to know that our fearless leader made his mom drive him to my football games to watch-” Chin uses both hands, this time, for the full air quote effect. “-my ‘footwork’. Doris told me about it while she was here.”“Oh God,” Steve says, wide-eyed, which is a mistake, because it’s as good as a confession.Or: In which Steve participates in team bonding (the high school gossip edition), manly bonding (the type that keeps him up at night) and something else he doesn’t have a name for yet (but he will, hopefully).





	Cause if we’re all gonna die (Now’s the time to be alive)

**Author's Note:**

> Question: Why am I sleep deprived? Answer: Almost definitely fanfiction. Meaning, if you know those fics that you wrote a while (or many many months) ago and you look at them and you think, ah, that's almost finished! I can do that before I go to bed! Then learn from my mistakes (someone should, seeing as I seem to be unable to) and don't fall for this trap you're setting for yourself. 
> 
> ANYWAY. This features the core four and my longstanding headcanon (which has substantial canon evidence) that they (almost) all had crushes on each other at some point in time, because Kono is a woman attracted to men and Steve and Danny are, I firmly believe, rather hopeless bisexuals, which makes for a dangerous cocktail when paired with a really sudden build of intense emotions and lots of tumultous case feelings and, you know, the fact that everyone in Five-0 could supplement their income through modeling, if they so wanted.
> 
> The title is a line from the lyrics of _How’s Your Day Going_ by 54-40.

Team bonding nights: they are a thing. They are a thing that involve a lot of alcohol, or at the very minimum enough to loosen tongues, which leads to unusual situations like Kono importantly saying “okay, but-” and then having to pause and clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from giggling. When she resumes, she waves a warning finger at Chin’s face. “I know for a fact that you told your mom about your first kiss.”

Steve is entirely unsure how they got here. It’s likely he zoned out a little, which, if it happened, might very possibly have been a combination of exhaustion after a long week, the effects of the alcohol, and the very distracting way Danny’s hands keep tilting and turning and twisting his nearly empty beer bottle. They’re never still, which is just… it’s so very Danny of them, and that is, fundamentally, oddly mesmerizing to Steve. 

Right now, in the present, Danny lets go of the beer bottle briefly and hoots, so Steve joins in. Danny has never led him astray before. Kono certainly seems tipsily satisfied by this response.

Chin holds up an imploring hand in protest, but he’s grinning all the same. “Hey, hey. I’m not the only one at this table whose mom knew about their teenage crushes.”

Kono gasps and leans in dramatically. Her elbows are resting on the table and she’s hanging over it so far her butt can’t be touching the seat of the booth anymore, even though Chin is sitting right next to her. “Who? Give us the dirt, cuz.”

Chin looks at Steve, and Steve is feeling so glowy and content that at first he doesn’t even register that as dangerous. Then Chin raises his eyebrows. “I happen to know that our fearless leader made his mom drive him to my football games to watch-” Chin uses both hands, this time, for the full air quote effect. “-my ‘footwork’. Doris told me about it while she was here.”

“Oh God,” Steve says, wide-eyed, which is a mistake, because it’s as good as a confession.

Danny hangs his head forward, shoulders shaking with how hard he’s laughing, and Kono reaches over ─ definitely getting out of her seat for a moment ─ to pat Steve’s hand consolingly. It’s a little condescending, which is an impression that doesn’t get lifted when she adds, “It’s okay, boss. It happens to the best of us.”

“Like you?” Chin asks.

She tosses her hair, both preening and exaggerating. “Of course. I _am_ the best of us.”

Danny is still curled over the table, but he’s paying more attention than it seemed he was. He hits the wood with a flat palm. “You can’t claim that and then not tell us your story, babe.”

Kono grins in a way that shows off her white teeth. She leaves them all hanging for another few seconds, just long enough that Steve thinks she’s going to keep this to herself, but then she doesn’t. “Okay, so I had a huge crush on Steve when I joined Five-0.”

“Of course,” Danny says, nodding. Chin directs his eyes heavenward, as if for strength, but he doesn’t actually look all that bothered.

“Oh God,” Steve repeats. They seem to be the only words he’s still capable of producing, watching this conversation unfold.

This is not how he remembers team bonding. Certainly the subject of love and sex naturally came up among SEALs too, but due to certain military policies or, more likely, hardcore heterosexuality combined with the fact that all active SEALs are male, there was never any talk of inter-team attraction. He’s also pretty sure he never heard any of his teams buddies use the word ‘crush’ in any context outside physically demolishing an object through brute force, which might be the part that baffles him even more.

This is why good units generally need women, Steve supposes. They bring unique perspectives to the table.

Kono continues unbothered by any of Steve’s deep ruminations. “After the first couple of weeks, it shifted to Danny, because by that point I obviously knew he was handsome and funny, but I’d also seen that he’s a good dad and that’s hot. Plus, he’s a great kisser.”

“Ha!” Danny yells. He punches Steve’s shoulder, like he just won something, and then blows Kono a parody of a kiss. Steve thinks he’d probably be jealous if he didn’t remember Kono and Danny’s actual kiss so well ─ pretty intense, but completely fake, meant as a distraction during one of Five-0’s very first cases. 

Chin lets his head drop in his hands with a groan.

“I’ll make it worse for you, buddy,” Danny promises, and he’s probably talking to Chin, but then he goes on to do just that for Steve, too. “Kono, sweetheart, you know I love you like a sister now, but you should know that the first time I met you, when you punched out that guy for stealing your wave and then said hi to us in your tiny bikini, that was not what I was thinking.”

“Thanks.” Kono leers. “You’re too kind.”

“Why?” Chin asks. “Why are we talking about your ages old crush on my baby cousin now?”

“Yeah,” Steve adds, because he’s feeling that. “Why?” And hey, look at that – he’s still capable of at least two other words. Desperate times call for an expanded vocabulary.

Danny extends a hand in Chin’s direction, diagonally over the table, and grabs Steve’s elbow and gives it a little shake. “No need to be jealous, guys. I have no problem admitting that you’re also both very handsome men. It’s always fun to watch you take off your shirts.” 

Steve feels like way more than his arm got shook up, but Chin is laughing openly. “Thank you. I’m afraid I don’t have much to add, because I don’t really swing that way and Kono is my cousin, but for what it’s worth, you two, you definitely ping as competency porn.”

Kono cackles.

“I’ll drink to that!” Danny says, heartily, and does. Steve snorts, and Danny turns to him. “Okay, your turn.”

He regrets making any kind of noise ever. “There’s nothing to tell.” 

“Nothing to-” Danny starts, but cuts himself off mid-sentence, like it was getting too ridiculous for him to waste any words on it. “Oh, come on, you’re not going to pretend you were watching buff quarterback Kelly purely for his _technique_, are you?”

“Alright, I _may_-” He puts emphasis on that word. If anybody asks later, he can fall back on plausible deniability, or possibly even claim this confession was coaxed from him under duress. “-have had some ulterior motives there.”

“Mahalo, brah,” Chin says easily, toasting him with his beer.

Danny is not as satisfied. It’s a problem on two counts, because it means he’s going to continue his interrogation, but the way he’s turned so he can directly watch Steve’s face also means there’s now some distance between their shoulders, and Steve was getting used to feeling Danny’s warmth there. 

“Seriously, that’s it for the McGarrett confession corner? Nothing else to tell? Because I, for one, don’t buy at all that you completely failed to notice that Kono is a very attractive woman-”

“My ego loves you right now, brah,” Kono says. 

“-or that our dear Chin, here, is an equally attractive man, even when he isn’t playing football.”

Chin raises his bottle for another toast, but this time in Danny’s direction, with a good layer of irony draped over top. 

Steve is starting to feel a little hot under the collar. It’s ridiculous, because it’s not like he’s wearing one of Danny’s dress shirts, but he pulls on his t-shirt anyway. “I plead the fifth.”

“Immunity and means,” Danny says, snapping his fingers in Steve’s face. “We got ways of making you talk. You yourself taught us those ways, foolishly.”

Steve eyes Danny, trying to gauge how serious he is. Chances of Danny attempting to dangle him off the side of a building or getting on a boat to locate a shark cage seem pretty minimal, but Steve changes tack anyway, just in case. “I just don’t think it’d be very appropriate for me to talk about this stuff, as your boss.”

“No! You’re playing the dictator card?” Kono asks. “_Now?_”

Danny doesn’t even seem to have patience for the argument that could’ve come from that. He’s extraordinarily single-minded today. “Come on,” he needles, “that’s just no fun. You need to embarrass yourself a little, precisely because we all work together. I just admitted I wouldn’t kick you out of bed, didn’t I?”

Steve whips his head around a little too abruptly. He forgets all about his discomfort with this topic and how important it is that he keeps evading. It’s gone, just like that, pushed away by this cuckoo’s chicken of a sentence. “No. That’s not what you said.”

“It’s not? Well, it’s what I meant. It was implied, I believe.” 

Steve looks at Kono and Chin, sitting across the table, watching in obvious amusement but not saying anything. He turns back to Danny. “So you implied you’d sleep with any of us, if given the chance?” 

“Sure,” Danny says agreeably, but he shrugs, and it doesn’t look quite serious. It’s so different from the way he talked about it when it was Steve and only Steve, that it spurs Steve to do something he never thought he’d be doing tonight, if ever. 

He clears his throat and peers down into the murky depths of his own empty bottle. “So, uh, there might have been something like a crush.” 

“Yeah?” Kono asks, smiling. “Who?” It’s a bit leery, but under that oddly soft, and Steve has a quiet moment of panic where he wonders if she knows something, before he realizes that it doesn’t matter, because he’s on the verge of talking about this anyway. 

“Danny,” he says, and he doesn’t look at Danny as he does it, because he doesn’t think he could bear that. He still knows for a fact that Danny is smirking now, because he’s just that attuned to Danny’s every movement and feeling. 

“I’m insulted, boss,” Kono says, but it’s light, flippant. 

Chin shakes his head sadly. “You’re trading down in the high school hierarchy, my friend. Danny was never a quarterback.” 

Danny’s hand, poking a finger in Chin’s direction, is the first part of Danny that enters Steve’s field of vision. He follows it: wrist, elbow, bicep that strains the lightly striped fabric. Danny’s shoulder, strong neck, chin, jaw, lips, nose, eyes ─ that’s where he gets a little lost, even though Danny’s still looking at Chin. 

“Excuse you,” Danny’s mouth says. Steve hurriedly finds something else to watch when he spots a flash of tongue. “I was on the baseball team. I was basically the baseball quarterback, if that were the kind of thing that existed.”

Kono is laughing now, so maybe this is not a reason to freak out. Chin is grinning, and Danny’s warmth is back right where Steve wanted it, all along his side. He shifts minutely and his knee touches Danny’s, and Danny doesn’t pull back, like he hasn’t even noticed.

Or, perhaps, like it’s as natural a thing to him as it is to Steve.

*

An hour later their group unanimously decides to pack it in. This means that Kono ─ who is crashing at Chin’s place ─ and Chin ─ who didn’t actually drink much ─ make their way to the parking lot and Chin’s trusty Ford, while Steve and Danny, who are headed in the opposite direction, go in search of a cab to share.

“So,” Steve drawls, as he tumbles out of the bar after Danny, because he would tumble after Danny pretty much anywhere. Danny turns half back around to him while he keeps walking and smiles, loose and happy, and Steve smiles back like he’s one of Pavlov’s dogs. The world feels a little unsteady under his feet in a way that is only partly to blame on the alcohol.

“So?” Danny prompts.

Steve has some difficulty remembering what he was going to say. He frowns at himself, knowing it had felt very important. Paramount, even. When it finally comes back to him, the way his brain puts the thought into words is a little less cool than he would have wished. “You wouldn’t kick me out of bed, huh?”

“Yeah, see, I figure I’d never have to,” Danny says, which sends Steve’s heart sinking for a scary moment, “what with you always getting up at the ass crack of dawn to go do _voluntary exercise_.” When Danny says _exercise_, he says it the way other people would say _water torture_.

Steve grins to himself. He wants to respond to that, get into some of that banter that is far too often the highlight of his days, but what comes out is, “You might.”

“Might? Might what?”

“Have to,” he clarifies, which isn’t much of a clarification at all, so he continues, “Kick me out.” 

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure I’d wanna leave any bed that had you in it.”

“Damn,” Danny says, laughing. “Smooth Dog. I see it now.”

Steve thinks that if they’re fostering this open atmosphere of sharing, he can add one more revelation to the list. “That was an ironic nickname.” 

Danny just laughs harder. “I figured.”

Steve likes that. He doesn’t generally like it when people assume things about him, but he likes it when Danny does, because it means he’s a little less weird for contemplating if Danny’s ties feel resentful these days and whether Danny could ever learn to sleep with the endless rush of the ocean in the background, and how badly Steve wants the answer to be yes. “You’ve thought about me?”

They have stopped walking. They’ve reached the corner of the block, where there’s enough traffic and touristy bars nearby that flagging down a ride shouldn’t be a difficult task. But Danny doesn’t go for the curb, where they would need to be ─ he leans against the brick of the nearest building, a store that’s closed this time of night, and he watches Steve while standing there, posed like a pinup. His eyes reflect the light of the street lamps and the headlights on passing cars, building up slowly and then gone with one last crescendo-ing flash, and then, then he says the damnedest thing, still smiling a little. “I think about you pretty much 24/7, babe.”

And so Steve, who is just a man, gives in to this gravitational pull he feels. He’s endured torture and injury and war and this is none of those things, but he’s never felt as helpless as he does now. He tumbles until he’s kissing Danny, awkwardly boxing Danny and his soft heat in against the cold and rough wall, not quite sure yet if this big bang is a creation myth or a mass extinction event.

Then Danny moves and there are hands on Steve’s hips and an even deeper, softer heat, and he thinks- He thinks it might be both. This one bit of human contact is wiping out all life in existence and scattering the atoms of the universe, only to reorder them fractionally and put them back _almost_ the way they were, but not quite. Everything that comes after this point in time will forever be witnessed by eyes that have to send images off to be processed in a brain that also stores the memory of this kiss, which logically and inescapably prevents anything from ever being experienced the same as before. 

When Steve eventually pulls back, he’s convinced the Buddhists must be onto something. Rebirth. 

“Well, would you look at that,” Danny says, but Steve is already looking at him, so he just keeps going on that path, because he’s very sure it’s the right one.

“I think-” Steve says, and the rest of that sentence is a lot of words stacked on top of each other and overlapping. _I think that was the best kiss I’ve ever had. I think I’m scared to way beyond death of allowing myself this happiness. I think, very probably, that I’m already in love with you._ “I think we’re never going to get a cab this way.”

Danny, whose lips are a little shinier than before, hums his way through a laugh. “You might be right,” he says, but even though that should have been a warning and Steve was the one who brought it up in the first place, Steve is still unprepared for when Danny affectionately knocks one of his arms out of the way to escape from his spot between a rock and a Steve place. 

He follows, mournful but hopeful, when Danny moves to the edge of the street. 

Danny raises an arm. He doesn’t look at Steve, so Steve keeps a careful eye on him, waiting for any trace of remorse.

What he gets instead is this: “So you like-like me, huh, babe?”

Steve stares at him. It’s a little ridiculous, because it feels like mind reading, but he doesn’t have it in him to be surprised. He’s nearly sure Danny knows this. “I guess,” he says. Considering their absolute lack of hesitancy to disagree with each other on any topic known to mankind and a few they invented all on their own, it’s tantamount to an impassioned agreement.

Danny glances at him in a way that says he’s reading it like that, too. “Hey,” he says, while a yellow car pulls up in front of them, “have you ever made out with a baseball quarterback in the back of a cab?”

Steve, as it turns out, has not. (It also turns out that this will only be true for another minute or so.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are good and appreciated and you are lovely and I'm going to get some sleep now. ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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